Regional News - Asia

Regional Workshop and INforSE meeting in New Delhi, May 18-21,1994

The start-up of INforSE activities in the Central Asia Region will be a 4-days workshop to develop a strategy for promoting rural energy for socioeconomic development through NGOs. It will be combined with the first INforSE meeting in this region. The workshop and meeting is organized by AFPRO (Action for Food Production). Limited support for travel expenses will be available for INforSE organizations from the region.

· to enhance-cooperation, linkages and sharing of expertise and knowledge on sustainable energy among countries in the region.

The expected outputs of the workshop are:

· a draft of a common framework for sustainable energy development appropriate for the Asia-Pacific region,

· a list of regional and country strategies for promoting job/employment creation through sustainable energy development,

· a catalogue of NGOs and other organizations concerned with sustainable energy development in the Asia-Pacific region. The venue of the workshop is the National Info- & Documentation Center for Science & Technology, 24 Ly Thuong Kiet, Hanoi, Vietnam (contact Mr. Nguyen Van Khanh). Parallel with the workshop there will be an exhibition with sustainable energy products.

Limited support for travel expenses will be available for INforSE organizations from the region.

A series of workshops on renewable energy and sustainable energy development was held in Manila and Batangas City during March 1-5, 1994. The workshops were attended by representatives from a number of Philippine INforSE organizations. Parts of the workshops were used to discuss INforSE and to make preparations for the regional workshop and INforSE meeting in April.

Further information: Benjamin Gertes (address above)

Sustainable Energy Networking in China

Until recently INforSE has not had any formal contact to China with its 1/5 of the world population and a remarkable development of renewable energy. The lack of contacts is mainly due to the structure in China, where sustainable energy solutions are not driven by NGOs in the way that can be seen in many other countries. Currently no Chinese organization has supported the sustainable energy strategy that INforSE is based upon.

This situation is now changing. The Asian Pacific coordinator Benjamin Gertes has visited a number of Chinese research and development centers, where he found a widespread interest in more cooperation with INforSE. A large number of contacts were made and professor Qi Wenhu was appointed as contact person.

Besides Qi Wenhu, George Chan is working as Chinese contact person for INforSE. He is widely known for his work with biogas and integrated farming systems.

Around New Year the news about the Narmada Dam in India looked promising. On December 31, the Narmada Control Authority was forced to announce that it was not going to close the sluice gates at the foot of the dam, because the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Social

Welfare stated that the conditions on resettlement and the environment had not been fulfilled. Nevertheless work on plugging sluices at the foot of the half-completed dam began on Wednesday, February 23. The Indian Government had assured the World Bank and its shareholder governments that the sluices would not be shut before June 1994. No warning was given either to the hundreds of families upstream whose farmlands will be permanently flooded, nor to the hundreds of thousands downstream whose drinking water supplies will be cut off for weeks while the river backs up to the height of the next set of sluices.

In November 1993, Peoples' Forum 2001, Japan was established to follow up the Agenda agreed at Global Forum'92 in Rio. They held the first symposium in February 1994 supported by many NGOs. The DERG (Decentralized Energy Research

Group) took initiative to a sub-conference on energy and set up an international information service window. (Dai Nakajima, DERG)

Support for PV in Japan

The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) will now give a subsidy of 50% for solar cells on individual houses. The maximum subsidy will be 2.7 million yen, allowing 50% subsidy for a 3 kW PV plant. It is quite unusual that subsidies from Japanese national budget is paid directly to consumers as they will be in this case.